Hello Wonks!! Happy New Year! Welcome to the Sunday Rundown where we are still dealing with 2018's shutdown because a weird haired motherfucker thinks it's ok to hurt EVERYONE to get his ridiculous pet project. So let's take a look at the idiots, liars, and dumbasses who came to the politics Sunday shows for that.

Appearing on "Fox News Sunday" to try to spin the idiotic shutdown in friendly territory, Sanders encountered something she wasn't expecting on Fox News: A fact-checking, tired-of-her-bullshit Chris Wallace. What follows is almost 11 minutes of excruciating smackdown, on live tv, from Wallace every time Sanders attempts another lie. Like when asked why not open the government up AND THEN legislate/negotiate for policy (like it's supposed to be done):

WALLACE: […] And the question is, why not sign that bill, fund those agencies that have nothing to do with the border wall, and not hold those hundreds of thousands of federal workers, and the services they provide, hostage?
SANDERS
: We're not holding anybody hostage. The president wants to fund the government; he wants to open the government --

WALLACE: But you could open those eight other agencies.

Sanders again tries to say that it's Democratic lawmakers not working in good faith or being "reasonable," but again Wallace is having NONE of it:

WALLACE: No, no, no. But do you -- but I'm not talking about Homeland Security. That -- you can continue to fight about that, if you want, and you shut it down -- but why hold agriculture hostage? Why hold justice hostage? Why hold the Treasury Department hostage?
Why not fund them? They have nothing to do with a border wall.

SANDERS: The president wants to do this all at once. He knows it's better if they can focus on getting all of these packages done at one time.

WALLACE: Isn't the real reason, because you want the leverage from all the agencies?

SANDERS: It's not just -- it's not that. But you also have to look at the six bills. Those aren't the budget that we submitted, either. There are a lot of discrepancies between what we --

WALLACE: Special Interest Aliens are just people who come from countries that have ever produced a terrorist. They're not terrorists themselves. And the State Department says that there is, quote, their words: 'no credible evidence of any terrorist coming across the border from Mexico.'

Let's move on to the non-Jared director of every agency in government (and acting chief of staff!), Mick Mulvaney.

Appearing on NBC's "Meet The Press," Mulvaney also tried to lie and spin about the shutdown. But it was the initial misleading statements about negotiations at the beginning that immediately catch your attention:

MULVANEY:
The first line that the chief negotiator said was, "We're not here to agree to anything," which is a stunning way to start a negotiation. And then after --

TODD:
Why is that stunning? I mean, none of their bosses were there and the president wasn't there, so nobody was empowered to make a deal. Isn't that normal? MULVANEY:
No, no, no, we were not -- let's make perfectly clear, we were not there to make a final deal. There is no question. TODD:
It was clear nobody was there to make a final deal? MULVANEY:
Correct. The specific mandate of the group was to try and find agreement on some of the underlying terms

See, this is the reason you have to interrupt Trump officials with on the spot fact checks. Because they will intentionally and deliberately misstate events/facts hoping that by the time it gets checked, their lies have already burrowed into the consciousness. Like Sanders, Mulvaney tries to mischaracterize the meeting to make it seem like Democrats are unreasonable when it was known from beginning that no one at the meeting had final authorization for any deal. Mulvaney knew this but tried to pass it by, and would have succeeded if Chuck Todd (CHUCK TODD!) had not fulfilled his bare minimum journalistic duties for calendar year 2019.

You guys, hi, hello, it is almost the holiday weekend, so we are going to share you a real video posted last night by "Doctor" Sebastian "Don't Call Me A Nazi" Gorka, that hilarious old knucklecuck. We guess now that he had to give up (or gave up voluntarily!) his Fox News contract, he just makes videos for the Twitter. Hoo ... ray?

Anyway, Gorka is super-excited that Donald Trump issued that order last night, giving Bill Barr all kinds of new powers to expose the Deep State for what it is and PROVE once and for all that the gremlins who live inside Trump's diarrhea are correct when they say Hillary ordered the Deep State to do an illegal witch hunt to Trump, yadda yadda yadda, you've seen these people huff paint before, we don't have to type it all.

Here is the video, after which Wonkette will either transcribe it OR we will provide our own dramatic interpretation. Which one will it be? We don't know! Would you be able to tell the difference between the two? We don't know!

We want to say right here at the outset that we hate Julian Assange. Aside from the sexual assault allegations against him, and aside from the fact that he's just a generally stinky and loathsome person who reportedly smeared poop on the walls at the Ecuadorian embassy in London, while reportedly not taking care of his cat, an innocent creature, he acted as Russia's handmaiden during the 2016 election, in order to further Russia's campaign to steal it for Donald Trump. All signs point to his campaign being a success!

So we are justifiably happy when bad things happen to Julian Assange. We are happy his name is shit the world over, and that any reputation WikiLeaks used to have for being on the side of freedom and transparency has been stuffed down the toilet where it belongs. We are happy he looked like such a sad-ass loser when the Ecuadorian embassy finally kicked him out and he was arrested.

And quite frankly, we were OK with the initial charge against him recently unsealed in the Eastern District of Virginia. If you'll remember, he was charged with trying to help Chelsea Manning hack a password into the Defense Department, which is not what journalists do. Journalists do not drive the get-away car for sources. Journalists do not hold their sources' hair back while they're stealing classified intel. Assange is essentially accused of doing all that.

Now, put all that aside. Because -- and this is key -- journalists do publish secrets they are provided by sources. That's First Amendment, chapter and verse, American as fucking apple pie and fast-food-induced diabetes. And that is what much of the superseding indictment of Assange unsealed yesterday was about. (And nope, it wasn't about anything regarding Assange's ratfucking the 2016 election or Hillary's emails. Why would the Trump Justice Department prosecute anything about that? It's all about the older Chelsea Manning stuff, the stuff the Obama Justice Department considered charging Assange with, but ultimately declined, because of that little thing called the First Amendment.)